The demise of the inter urban trolley

[Green Maned Lion]

Oh, it derails and has problems often enough that it could


What? Why?

it prices people out of cities. We are a country who talks about wanting to combat discrimination, then takes great joy in discriminating on social and economic status.

 

[MARC Rider]

it prices people out of cities. We are a country who talks about wanting to combat discrimination, then takes great joy in discriminating on social and economic status.

BRT prices people out of cities? Or spurring real estate development? On the other hand, my hometown of Baltimore used to have almost a million residents, now it has less than 650,000. I would think there's room in the city for real estate development that could provide housing for 350,000 people at price points affordable by all classes. I'd like to see such real estate development instead of putting the affordable housing way out in the fringes far from any walkable neighborhoods or useful public transportation.

 

[daybeers]

it prices people out of cities

No, MARC Rider is correct, the real estate does that. Transit-oriented development (or TOD) has been a buzzword in development for several years now, but it's difficult to get right and easy to do very wrong, ex. not changing parking requirements, thus having dozens more spaces needed when a housing development is adjacent to a transit station. It's also not building housing for different price points and the tons of "insider deals" with developers.

Definitely some of the blame can be put on transit agencies for not partnering correctly with developers and not inducing the correct development around transit, but the transit is not to blame.

 

[neroden]

Ipso facto, residential real estate development in cities makes it *cheaper* for people to live in cities. (Well, unless they're knocking down apartment buildings to build single-family mansions, which has been a thing in Seattle.) But *commercial*, *office*, and *industrial* real estate development makes it more expensive for people to live in cities. Despite which, I think that's better than building the commercial space out in the wilderness where everyone has to drive to it.

There's a history in the US for the past 70 years of allowing completely out-of-proportion development with far more commercial/office development than residential development in cities: more jobs, but no more housing. This had predictable results. You have to build housing to match the jobs.

 

[Green Maned Lion]

BRT prices people out of cities? Or spurring real estate development? On the other hand, my hometown of Baltimore used to have almost a million residents, now it has less than 650,000. I would think there's room in the city for real estate development that could provide housing for 350,000 people at price points affordable by all classes. I'd like to see such real estate development instead of putting the affordable housing way out in the fringes far from any walkable neighborhoods or useful public transportation.

Real estate development; I couldn’t imagine you were asking why I wasn’t a fan of BRT when I outlined that in great detail a few posts up. It’s not that there isn’t ‘room’ to put affordable housing in TOD projects; it’s that there is no business case for doing so. What earthly reason would a real estate developer put in houses at affordable per-square-foot prices when they could sell that same square footage for more? TOD projects tend to take place where there is already an acceptable levelof transit and affordable housing (read: slums). They remove this somewhat transit accessible housing through “urban renewal“ (read: eviction of undesirable people) and replace it with expensive housing and enhanced transit access for the chosen few who can afford it.

I am quite frankly terrified that somebody is going to TOD the river line and make the poor but very nice town I live in an enclave of rich bozos. I’m sure I could still afford it, but who wants to live in such a place?

 

[MARC Rider]

What earthly reason would a real estate developer put in houses at affordable per-square-foot prices when they could sell that same square footage for more?

For one thing, there's a finite number of people who can afford to buy some of the ridiculously priced stuff that I've seen on the market recently (well, over the past 20 years). I don't know who's buying this stuff, unless it's Russian oligarchs parking their cash for nefarious purposes. So, free market fundamentalists believe the market will eventually sort this out. The rest of us may need to advocate government policies at all levels of government to make sure people aren't priced out of housing in semi-convenient locations. These could include building even more housing units to jack up the supply, price controls on housing units as a precondition for zoning approval, extra property taxes on non-residents, requirements for a minimum number of rental units at affordable prices, etc. We really need to do something, I drive through vast swaths of Baltimore City and it's depressing to see how perfectly good neighborhoods have turned into slums. Our cities are rotting in the cores, and people making normal incomes are increasingly required to drive long distances away from convenient parts of the city in order to find housing they can afford.

 

[Joe from PA]

All of the new light rail and streetcars I've seen use pantographs, not poles. Even the SEPTA suburban trolleys, serving 69th St. and Media/Sharon Hill, which went into service over 100 years ago, use pantographs.
View attachment 26655

I live in Media. This trolley goes from Media to West Philadelphia. If you want to go to center-city, you need to take the subway. Along the way, this trolley can drop you near a shopping mall, supermarkets, doctor offices, etc. Best of all, the ride is free for those over 65.

 

[Bonser]

From what I have read the bus companies, at that time many were private and didn't want competition. They purchased many of the city trolley lines, closed them and pulled up the tracks.

GM bought the trolley lines in Los Angeles to boost sales of its cars and buses. This was in the late 1940's, I think.

 

[Green Maned Lion]

For one thing, there's a finite number of people who can afford to buy some of the ridiculously priced stuff that I've seen on the market recently (well, over the past 20 years). I don't know who's buying this stuff, unless it's Russian oligarchs parking their cash for nefarious purposes. So, free market fundamentalists believe the market will eventually sort this out. The rest of us may need to advocate government policies at all levels of government to make sure people aren't priced out of housing in semi-convenient locations. These could include building even more housing units to jack up the supply, price controls on housing units as a precondition for zoning approval, extra property taxes on non-residents, requirements for a minimum number of rental units at affordable prices, etc. We really need to do something, I drive through vast swaths of Baltimore City and it's depressing to see how perfectly good neighborhoods have turned into slums. Our cities are rotting in the cores, and people making normal incomes are increasingly required to drive long distances away from convenient parts of the city in order to find housing they can afford.

I can appreciate your idealism, but I fear my, what most call, cynicism is closer to realism.

 

[MARC Rider]

I live in Media. This trolley goes from Media to West Philadelphia. If you want to go to center-city, you need to take the subway. Along the way, this trolley can drop you near a shopping mall, supermarkets, doctor offices, etc. Best of all, the ride is free for those over 65.

This is true, except that 69th St. Terminal is not quite West Philadelphia, rather it's in Upper Darby Township. But the ride is free if you're over 65!

 

[dwebarts]

GM bought the trolley lines in Los Angeles to boost sales of its cars and buses. This was in the late 1940's, I think.

The film "Who Framed Roger Rabbit" reveals some of this history. Hollywood has been pretty good about telling the history of Los Angeles over the years. "Chinatown" has a lot to say about water in that regard,

 

[Willbridge]

GM bought the trolley lines in Los Angeles to boost sales of its cars and buses. This was in the late 1940's, I think.

It was a bit more subtle than that. They financed the new bus operators, in particular National City Lines. Portland Traction / Rose City Transit Co. did not buy a GM bus until 1961 because one of the GM-financed firms had fought to get the franchise in 1936.

I used to think it was a bit far-fetched when the president of the Dayton transit company claimed that GM provided prostitutes at transit industry conventions. Then an incident at a conference in 1990 made me reconsider my skepticism.

 

[BlackDiamond]

I have often thought the National City Lines / GM conspiracy theory of the demise of the trolley to be a bit overblown. Let's face it, trolley lines were in trouble anyway and were probably doomed in the postwar years:
1) Systems were totally worn out after depression followed by WW2 had deferred maintenance and equipment replacement.
2) Onerous requirements for companies to maintain streets, plow in winter etc.
3) Inability to raise fares to keep up with inflation.
4) Loss of off peak riders who preferred to drive, resulting in a system used primarily for peak hours only but required to run ~18 hours a day / 7 days a week.
5) Public infatuation with cars as the cool new thing and trolleys as old fashioned.

 

[Metra Electric Rider]

My take is that conspiracy is probably an overblown and overused term - a friend and I decided after spending a weekend with a another friend who is big into conspiracy theories, after noticing on our way home that we are a country that effectively manage a Denny's, that running a national conspiracy with hundreds of moving parts (aka participants) and the chance of those moving parts not talking, well, it's just too much to effectively manage.

I do think that there was an intentional move to buy up and replace streetcar systems - they had done their job for their original owners, which was to develop the property they owned. Once that was done, they were too expensive to run. I think there might be a lesson for Brightline in this somewhere.

Another aspect that people forget (this is mainly my opinion, I haven't done extensively research on this) is that railroads were still seen at this time as being adjunct to the robber barons of the 19th century by a lot of people, hence there wasn't a great deal of support for railroad companies being taken over by municipalities - although they should have been. Plus there was too much competition from other transit providers such as bus companies. Had this been rationalized, i.e. a municipal owner running one line rather than three, on one competing route, the streetcars could have been effectively run and modernized. Obviously not everywhere, but in more places.

 

[neroden]

I am quite frankly terrified that somebody is going to TOD the river line and make the poor but very nice town I live in an enclave of rich bozos. I’m sure I could still afford it, but who wants to live in such a place?

You don't understand the situation at ALL. Here's what happens when an area becomes desirable:

If you don't allow vertical high-density development, what happens is that your town becomes an enclave of rich bozos who are living in the exact same single-family lots, but building mansions on them. This is documented in Seattle.

If you also prohibit the mansions, you get rich bozos paying rich-bozo prices for dilapidated apartments. This is what happened in San Francisco.

In short, it has nothing to do with the developers. If the location is attractive, it'll get filled with rich people. Building denser development allows more people to live there and therefore might mean there's a chance for some of the non-rich people to stay.

In general, rich people will always take the most attractive locations. The only solution is to build a huge amount of housing, so that after the rich people have taken the most attractive locations, there are still attractive locations left for everyone else.

Only way to prevent the rich people from moving in is to make your location unattractive, which is a really stupid thing to do by any measure. It's the "Well, maybe if we have more shootouts we won't get gentrification" solution.

So what you have to do is try to *dilute* the rich people.

Anyway, the influx of rich people is going to either happen or not happen to the RiverLine regardless of what developers do. It comes first, before the developers. You've got cause and effect reversed.

I do think it's critical to fight against *displacement* -- when bigoted people try to force out established residents or businesses on the grounds that they're "unattractive" or "undesirable". You can't do anything about the inherent attractiveness of a location without sabotaging yourself. But you *can* make a location more attractive to decent people and less attractive to bigoted jackasses simultaneously...

 

[MARC Rider]

You don't understand the situation at ALL. Here's what happens when an area becomes desirable:

If you don't allow vertical high-density development, what happens is that your town becomes an enclave of rich bozos who are living in the exact same single-family lots, but building mansions on them. This is documented in Seattle.

If you also prohibit the mansions, you get rich bozos paying rich-bozo prices for dilapidated apartments. This is what happened in San Francisco.

In short, it has nothing to do with the developers. If the location is attractive, it'll get filled with rich people. Building denser development allows more people to live there and therefore might mean there's a chance for some of the non-rich people to stay.

In general, rich people will always take the most attractive locations. The only solution is to build a huge amount of housing, so that after the rich people have taken the most attractive locations, there are still attractive locations left for everyone else.

Only way to prevent the rich people from moving in is to make your location unattractive, which is a really stupid thing to do by any measure. It's the "Well, maybe if we have more shootouts we won't get gentrification" solution.

So what you have to do is try to *dilute* the rich people.

Anyway, the influx of rich people is going to either happen or not happen to the RiverLine regardless of what developers do. It comes first, before the developers. You've got cause and effect reversed.

I do think it's critical to fight against *displacement* -- when bigoted people try to force out established residents or businesses on the grounds that they're "unattractive" or "undesirable". You can't do anything about the inherent attractiveness of a location without sabotaging yourself. But you *can* make a location more attractive to decent people and less attractive to bigoted jackasses simultaneously...

One thing you need to do is protect people of modest means who own a modestly priced house is to index property tax rates to income as well as the value of the property. One of the problems with gentrification is that if property values skyrocket, then people of modest means can't afford the taxes on their own homes and are thus displaced. Sure, they could sell the house and move to a cheaper one with taxes they could afford, but that's pretty disruptive, plus it leads to the area being entirely rich bozos.

Indexing property tax rates to income is not hard to do. We have such a system in Maryland. It was great for me, because the first year I owned a home, they indexed to my previous year's income as a starving graduate school research assistant, and I didn't have to pay property taxes at all until the next year, when I definitely had the money to do so. Even now, I get a few hundred dollars a year tax credit on my property tax, even though I have close to a six-figure income.

This, of course, doesn't deal with the problem of developers only building housing priced for rich bozos.

 

[Green Maned Lion]

You don't understand the situation at ALL. Here's what happens when an area becomes desirable:

If you don't allow vertical high-density development, what happens is that your town becomes an enclave of rich bozos who are living in the exact same single-family lots, but building mansions on them. This is documented in Seattle.

If you also prohibit the mansions, you get rich bozos paying rich-bozo prices for dilapidated apartments. This is what happened in San Francisco.

In short, it has nothing to do with the developers. If the location is attractive, it'll get filled with rich people. Building denser development allows more people to live there and therefore might mean there's a chance for some of the non-rich people to stay.

In general, rich people will always take the most attractive locations. The only solution is to build a huge amount of housing, so that after the rich people have taken the most attractive locations, there are still attractive locations left for everyone else.

Only way to prevent the rich people from moving in is to make your location unattractive, which is a really stupid thing to do by any measure. It's the "Well, maybe if we have more shootouts we won't get gentrification" solution.

So what you have to do is try to *dilute* the rich people.

Anyway, the influx of rich people is going to either happen or not happen to the RiverLine regardless of what developers do. It comes first, before the developers. You've got cause and effect reversed.

I do think it's critical to fight against *displacement* -- when bigoted people try to force out established residents or businesses on the grounds that they're "unattractive" or "undesirable". You can't do anything about the inherent attractiveness of a location without sabotaging yourself. But you *can* make a location more attractive to decent people and less attractive to bigoted jackasses simultaneously...

Personally, I think San Francisco is an example of an exception to the rule; in fact I think it exists as an example of localized inflation, like Williston, ND.

 

[neroden]

Personally, I think San Francisco is an example of an exception to the rule; in fact I think it exists as an example of localized inflation, like Williston, ND.

San Francisco is the most extreme case, but you can see the same phenomenon in New York City, LA, Minneapolis,... and even tiny Ithaca, NY.

The children of Chinese billionaires, attending Cornell University, will sometimes simply buy single-family houses for use while attending college. All the "development restrictions" in the world won't stop them. The obscenely rich students can afford to simply buy out the "single-family" districts if they want to, and so they have been moving in on them.

Somewhat less rich people who want to retire here buy up "homes for people of modest means" and build their dream mansions. If it's a historic district, where they can't demolish the building (which it frequently is), they just build their expensive-rich-person house inside the existing house.

Meanwhile, other not-super-rich-but-still-rich students "slum it" in shoddy, decrepit apartments close to campus for which they pay higher rents than the Cornell staff can afford. It's been driving the lower-paid Cornell staff to live 30 or 60 minutes away in neighboring cities.

The only way to blunt the effects of this and make it possible for the staff to live in Ithaca, which they mostly want to do, is to build more apartment buildings. (Of course, that will empty out the housing demand in the neighboring cities; there's always an effect. I've suggested connecting the neighboring cities by passenger rail to make them more desirable relative to Ithaca, but it's so outside the thinking of current politicians it's got no traction so far.)

The underlying cause is a 1950s era zoning code which came very close to prohibiting new housing construction. As a result, there was basically nothing built in the City of Ithaca for 50 years. For part of that time, the Town of Ithaca sprawled ranch houses onto greenfields, but then they stopped too. During the entire period, the number of jobs and students has grown, and the housing simply hasn't kept up, because it was illegal for it to keep up.

 

[Bob Dylan]

San Francisco is the most extreme case, but you can see the same phenomenon in New York City, LA, Minneapolis,... and even tiny Ithaca, NY.

The children of Chinese billionaires, attending Cornell University, will sometimes simply buy single-family houses for use while attending college. All the "development restrictions" in the world won't stop them. The obscenely rich students can afford to simply buy out the "single-family" districts if they want to, and so they have been moving in on them.

Somewhat less rich people who want to retire here buy up "homes for people of modest means" and build their dream mansions. If it's a historic district, where they can't demolish the building (which it frequently is), they just build their expensive-rich-person house inside the existing house.

Meanwhile, other not-super-rich-but-still-rich students "slum it" in shoddy, decrepit apartments close to campus for which they pay higher rents than the Cornell staff can afford. It's been driving the lower-paid Cornell staff to live 30 or 60 minutes away in neighboring cities.

The only way to blunt the effects of this and make it possible for the staff to live in Ithaca, which they mostly want to do, is to build more apartment buildings. (Of course, that will empty out the housing demand in the neighboring cities; there's always an effect. I've suggested connecting the neighboring cities by passenger rail to make them more desirable relative to Ithaca, but it's so outside the thinking of current politicians it's got no traction so far.)

The underlying cause is a 1950s era zoning code which came very close to prohibiting new housing construction. As a result, there was basically nothing built in the City of Ithaca for 50 years. For part of that time, the Town of Ithaca sprawled ranch houses onto greenfields, but then they stopped too. During the entire period, the number of jobs and students has grown, and the housing simply hasn't kept up, because it was illegal for it to keep up.

Good Post, this is happening everywhere that's growing as you said!